C'en est trop, à la fin,
Et tu me mets à bout par ces contes frivoles.[1]
Do they include in their one fell swoop the tale of Troy divine, the tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer, the tales of the Princess Scheherazade? A tale has been called the germ of every other kind of composition—of Novel, Tragedy, Comedy, Epic, and all. "It is the first key to tune the infant's heart, which swells up to the very eyes at its mother's tale. It is often the last to win its way into the fastness of age, which weeps, and thrills, and shakes its grey locks at nothing so much as at a tale." Old Menenius Agrippa immortalised himself by his faculty in this line of things, when he said to the seditious Romans (if we may quote Shakapeare's proem as authority):
I shall tell you
A pretty tale; it may be, you have heard it;
But, since it serves my purpose, I will venture
To stale’t a little more.[2]
Assuredly the gift in question is no every-day one, and this gift Mr. Hawthorne possesses in no common degree. We need but allude to "Lady Eleanor’s Mantle," "Rappaccini’s Daughter," "Roger Melvin's Burial," "The Birth-Mark," "Young Goodman Browne," "The Haunted Mind," &c. His stories have been likened to Tieck's, in their power of translating the mysterious harmonies of Nature into articulate meanings; and to Töpffer's, in high finish and purity of style. Perhaps the chief fascination about them is their "unworldliness." The self-willed wandering of dreamy thought in such pieces (how Elia would have greeted them with an "Ah, benedicite!") as "Monsieur du Miroir," "Earth's Holocaust," and the "Procession of Life," is delightful. What caustic and comprehensive mental analysis in the "Christmas Banquet!" What Bunyan-like discernment in the "Celestial Railroad!" What spiritual insight in the "Bosom Serpent!" But we must pause, in deference to our compositor's stock of "marks of admiration," and to the gentle reader's over-strained quality of mercy.
Mr. Hawthorne, we are told, is astonished at his own celebrity, and "thinks himself the most overrated man in America." Let him bring out of his treasures things new and old—other original legends and other twice-told tales—and we can promise him a fresh and increasing fund of astonishment, until, like Katerfelto, his hair stand on end at his own wonders. And so we bid him very heartily farewell!
